#CinemaRevival
Zero de Conduite
by Jean Vigo
Here it is, our final film of the #CinemaRevival season. Our choice? One of cinema’s great acts of rebellion – Jean Vigo’s enormously influential portrait of prankish boarding-school students, based on the director’s own experiences as a youth, Zéro de Conduite presents childhood as a time of unfettered imagination and brazen rule-flouting. It’s a sweet-natured vision of sabotage made vivid by dynamic visual experiments—including the famous, blissful slow-motion pillow fight.
REASONS TO WATCH
– Though the film was not immediately popular, it has proven to be enduringly influential. François Truffaut paid homage in his 1959 film ‘The 400 Blows’. The anarchic classroom and recess scenes in Truffaut’s film borrow from Vigo’s film, as does a classic scene in which a mischievous group of schoolboys are led through the streets by one of their schoolmasters. Director Lindsay Anderson has acknowledged that his own film ‘If…’ was inspired by ‘Zero de Conduite’. Another key film to be influenced by this is Steve Mcqueen’s prison-strike masterpiece ‘Hunger’
-Banned by the French censor until well after World War II. The children’s revolt in the film was rather mild, as there were no guns and the deadliest weapons were tiles torn from the school roof. However, the Comité national du cinema was concerned that the film was an attack on the French school system as a whole.
– Was chosen by Premiere magazine as one of the ‘100 Movies That Shook the World’, included among the ‘1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die’, and included on Roger Ebert’s ‘Great Movies’ list.
– Vigo’s biographer Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes compared the boarding school in the film to a microcosm of the world, stating that “the division to the children and adults inside the school corresponds to the division of society into classes outside: a strong minority imposing its will on a weak majority.”
NOTES
Zero for Conduct was shot from December 1932 until January 1933 with a budget of 200,000 francs. Vigo used mostly non-professional actors and sometimes people that he spotted on the street. The four main characters are all based on real people that Vigo had known in his youth. Caussat and Bruel were based on friends from Millau, Colin was based on a friend he had known in Chartes and Tabard was based on Vigo himself. The teachers depicted in the film were based on the guards at La Petite Roquette juvenile prison where Vigo’s father Miguel Almereyda had once been an inmate. The film’s soundtrack was poor in quality due to budgetary constraints but Vigo’s use of poetic, rhythmic dialogue has been said to make it much easier to understand what characters are saying.[1] At one point in the film, Tabard tells his teachers “shit on you!”, which was once a famous headline in a French newspaper that Vigo’s father had directed at all world governments. Vigo’s poor health became worse during the film’s production but he was able to complete the editing.
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Enjoy the film!